A Florida judge called both Apple and Google's Motorola Mobility out in court, saying that neither of them really wants to resolve these patent matters.

U.S. District Judge Robert Scola -- a federal judge in Miami, Florida -- said that Apple and Motorola Mobility are wasting the court's time with patent infringement lawsuits that they have no intention of solving.

“The parties have no interest in efficiently and expeditiously resolving this dispute; they instead are using this and similar litigation worldwide as a business strategy that appears to have no end,” said Judge Scola. “That is not a proper use of this court.”

Judge Scola's main issue is that Apple and Motorola Mobility currently have over 180 claims regarding 12 patents and are arguing over the meaning of over 100 terms.

“Without a hint of irony, the parties now ask the court to mop up a mess they made by holding a hearing to reduce the size and complexity of the case,” wrote Judge Scola. “The court declines this invitation.”

The court has given Apple and Motorola Mobility four months to narrow the case down, and if they fail to do so, the case will be put on hold until all disputes over terms are resolved.

Apple and Motorola Mobility have been tossing patent infringement lawsuits around since 2010. Many see these cases as a way of struggling for market share and pushing the competitor's products out rather than attempting to solve real issues.

I can't be bothered to respond to the specifics of your flatulent petulance. Just being angry about how things have turned out is no excuse for wilful ignorance. Believing that the whole world is out of step except for you and that everyone else is stupid because they buy different devices, or make different decisions about technologies than you do, is no doubt reassuring but it is only for the childish.

There are real, substantial and (unfortunately for you) complex reasons why Apple and Samsung are the only two companies that are succeeding in the mobile arena and why Apple successfully migrated from being a a small player in the PC market to being a hugely successful mobile device company and why Microsoft so utterly failed at making the similar transition.

is happening for a real reasons and thinking that 500 million Apple customers are stupid is in itself monumentally and inexcusably stupid and shallow.

As for the patent wars, they are irritating but they are just fluff. I cannot think of a single major or even minor impact that the legal battles have had in the actual market place. What has been blocked from happening in the mobile device markets that would have happened but for legal actions? Nothing.

Innovation in the new mobile markets seems to spread astonishingly fast across the entire market unimpeded by the games of lawyers. Although I know a lot of people get all wound up by the whole patent thing but it is actually just a storm in a tea cup.

Can anyone now even remember any of the numerous legal actions associated with the rise of the PC, which were just as numerous as the current crop of patent cases, or point to where in any way innovation was held back in the PC world by any legal action? It's just a tech soap opera and frankly there are far more important and interesting things to discuss.

I repeat - IP and patent related legal action in the tech industries are utterly trivial and will have almost no impact on the evolution of the tech industry.

It seems to me that any outsider looking at the tech industry, and the IP and patent landscape, would come to the conclusion that IP protection and patents are actually very ineffective. Almost no product or innovation does not get copied and emulated. About the only area where the law seem to very effective is around brand names and to a less extent branding. Market a phone that's called an iPhone and you will almost certainly end up being blocked by the law, make a phone that looks just like an iPhone (or a Galaxy S4, or any other handset) and most likely it will go on sale and remain on sale largely unencumbered by legal restraint.

There is way too much hysteria and over excitement around the patent issue, it's boring and and in the real world mostly unimportant. The only people it makes a real difference to are lawyers who get a lot of high paid work from it.

I am yet to see anyone actually point at some area of tech that has been stalled or even significantly slowed down by patent problems. When I look across the tech industries what I see is rapid innovation everywhere and when a major new approach or idea emerges it seems to spread rapidly across the industry.Just because something is irritating, or unjust or sometimes quite bad does not make it armageddon or catastrophic. It's just a bit bad, but mostly the tech industry is in pretty good shape. IP litigation is just a negative but trivial aspect of the industry. It's not even unusual. All industrial sectors when going through paradigm shifting technical change throw up IP related legal activity, it's perfectly normal and utterly transient. And not that important in the big scheme of things.I am not saying that IP litigation is not real or that it does not have real world repercussions it's just that it is so often discussed in a such an overblown, hysterical and doom laden way that rational discourse becomes impossible. IP litigation is a bit of problem, but not a very big one and certainly not one that will decide the fate or direction of the industry or of any remotely major aspect of technical innovation.

Here is a challenge: list some reasonable significant pieces of tech innovation that has been blocked from spreading around the mobile device commercial ecosystem by legal action?

Obviously IP legal action has led to various license fees being paid by various companies but they hardly matter except to the utterly incompetent non-Samsung Android OEMs and their problems are the result of being so incompetent that they are somehow failing to make a profit in the booming device markets. Any problems they have paying license fees are the result of commercial incompetence and not the inherent nature or weight of IP law.

I don't care to do the research but I would bet money that if any company was able to stop another company for infringing of mobile comm IP it would have been Motorola. But they would have deserved that protection.

They deserved that protection because they did all the R&D (or licensing as needed) as part of a complete system. They had to create everything from the mobile units like 2 way radios, the first car phones, the transmission tower tech, amps, repeaters, base station equipment and related peripherals along with any special diagnostic equipment.

I can also guarantee that if they did sue a company for infringing patents that it wasn't over something as trivial as the font, shape or color of a single button (icon). They would have had much bigger fish to fry.

Would Motorola of old be a troll? IMO, absolutely not! Perhaps a monopoly but certainly not an IP troll. You have to give them credit where credit is due.

Apple on the other hand is grasping at straws because their iphone was designed to work in an existing ecosystem that was built and functional before they even had a phone.

I'll give Woz credit as he had some engineering chops that was used in the first Apple computer. But all they have done since is repackage and make proprietary what everyone else is doing. IMO, they got lucky with the iphone.

quote: They deserved that protection because they did all the R&D (or licensing as needed) as part of a complete system. They had to create everything from the mobile units like 2 way radios, the first car phones, the transmission tower tech, amps, repeaters, base station equipment and related peripherals along with any special diagnostic equipment.

Poor guys.

What Motorola can't seem to do is sell phones for a profit. That's a bit of a show stopper for a phone company.

BTW Motorola sued Apple first.

quote: IMO, they got lucky with the iphone.

How? In what sense did the several years of work done by Apple in the build up to the launch of the first iPhone, including all the development work on the hardware and new OS, as well as the years spent building the supporting iTunes ecosystem, constitute 'luck'.

"An earlier study by the same two academics measured indirect costs of patent troll lawsuits, using public companies' stock prices as a proxy for the damages. That study found those costs to be about $83 billion annually."

quote: Here is a challenge: list some reasonable significant pieces of tech innovation that has been blocked from spreading around the mobile device commercial ecosystem by legal action?

Google's webm. Google buys the company behind the codec plus their patents on it, mpegla then finally agrees to a license, then Nokia comes in and starts to block it from being a standard with their patents. Funny how Nokia didn't give two shts about it until now.

Vlingo tried to sell their voice command system to apple and google, until Nuance filed 6 lawsuits over broad patents. The first costed Vlingo $3 million dollars, money that could have gone to actual development. He won, then lost all his money and sold his company to Nuance.

quote: Obviously IP legal action has led to various license fees being paid by various companies but they hardly matter except to the utterly incompetent non-Samsung Android OEMs and their problems are the result of being so incompetent that they are somehow failing to make a profit in the booming device markets. Any problems they have paying license fees are the result of commercial incompetence and not the inherent nature or weight of IP law.

That's shows you know nothing but are an armchair analyst.

Bill Gates said it best.

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."

"...some large company will patent some obvious thing [and use the patent to] take as much of our profits as they want.”